I

In early January this year, sixteen-year-old Anand Chouhan started the 825-kilometer walk from his village in Bihar to Uttar Pradesh. His destination was Ayodhya. Chouhan had scarcely left his village save for the time when he joined the wedding procession of a friend’s sister to a neighboring district – an experience he livestreamed on his YouTube channel.

The trip to Ayodhya would take much more planning. If he only stopped for meals and rest, he reckoned he could cover the distance in fifteen days. Over a few weeks, Chouhan persuaded three of his friends to come with him. They stuffed their backpacks with blankets to endure the cold and deep-fried snacks to keep up the energy. When their parents heard their sons were going to Ayodhya, they opened their wallets and gave their blessings. Each young man contributed Rs 5,000 (£50) to the joint mission.

Chouhan departed from his village just before dawn, dressed in a gray shirt, faded jeans, a sturdy sports jacket, and a saffron shawl wrapped around his head. Lacking proper shoes, he had no option but to set off wearing only an old pair of slippers, but he didn’t mind. He had invested in something far more crucial to the journey: a three-foot-long flex banner that he strapped to his backpack. It served as a walking advertisement for his social media presence, featuring his Instagram details and a QR code that directed passers-by to his YouTube channel.

Stopping for their first break that morning, Chouhan uploaded a video of himself shot on his mobile phone. ‘Hi, guys. I am Anand Chouhan. I am starting on an 825-kilometer journey on foot to Ayodhya from Bairbana village in Purnia. Please support me. Like my videos and subscribe to my channel. In the comments, write, Jai Shri Ram.’

(Glory to Lord Ram.)

II

‘Tell me, great one, who is the most virtuous man in the world of humans? Who is the most honorable, dutiful, gracious, and resolute? Who is the most courteous, the most dedicated to the welfare of all beings, the most learned, the most patient and handsome? Who is the man with the greatest soul, the one who has conquered anger, who is intelligent and free of envy? Who is this man, whose anger frightens even the gods?’

Thus begins the legend of Ram. It was sometime between 750 and 500 BCE that Valmiki, a Hindu ascetic, composed the epic poem in Sanskrit about a warrior-king who embodies every virtue known to humanity. Ramayana, the most enduring of all Indian tales, puts its hero through a series of trials. Some are inner tests of strength, others on the battlefront. Through them Ram demonstrates how to live by the principles of dharma.

The story is set in Kosala, a majestic kingdom on the banks of the River Sarayu. Its capital is Ayodhya, where the mighty king Dasharatha lives in a palace with three wives and four sons. Ram is the oldest of them and the most deserving heir to the throne. But on the eve of his ascension, Dasharatha exiles the righteous prince to keep a promise made to his jealous third wife, who wanted her own son, Bharat, to become the king.

Ram, along with his devoted wife Sita and loyal brother Lakshmana, withdraws into a forest south of Ayodhya. The defining event of their exile is Sita’s kidnap by Ravana, the mighty rakshasa king of Lanka. To rescue his wife from Ravana’s fortified kingdom, Ram has to traverse an ocean and defeat a formidable army. He assembles a diverse group of allies, including a brigade of combat-ready monkeys, steered by their leader Hanuman. By constructing a bridge across the ocean, a remarkable feat of engineering, Ram and his battalion of monkeys reach the island of Lanka, and after a fierce battle, he kills Ravan and rescues Sita. The story culminates with Ram’s triumphant return to Ayodhya fourteen years later, when he is anointed king. His reign, known as Rama Rajya, ushers in a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity.

Valmiki gave no indication that the cities and kingdoms in the Ramayana were inspired by real places. But in 1574, while India was under Mughal rule, the wandering saint Tulsidas authored a new rendition of Valmiki’s epic, elevating Ram to divine status and affirming Awadhpuri (also known as Ayodhya), where he began writing the manuscript, as his birthplace. But even his text did not fuss over the physical location for the mythological kingdom. If the god can be found in a devotee’s heart, so can his birthplace, went his message. Avadh tahan jahan Ram nivasu.

(Wherever Ram is, there is Ayodhya.)

Once written down, the events associated with these Ramayanas entered the realm of facts.

Half a century before Tulsidas completed his adaptation, a Mughal general built a mosque in Ayodhya reflecting the architectural style of that period. Named for Babur, the first Mughal emperor of the subcontinent, the Babri Masjid featured a large prayer hall, several smaller rooms, and a spacious front courtyard. It was distinguished by tall spires and three domes.

By the seventeenth century, however, it was widely believed locally that the Mughals had demolished a Ram temple to build the mosque, and that this temple was located at the birthplace of Ram. And when the East India Company annexed the area in the 1850s, they found that Hindu–Muslim conflict over the site was frequent. Following an outbreak of riots, British administrators erected boundary walls to create separate worship areas for Muslims and Hindus. The Hindus were allowed to conduct worship at a provisional setup a hundred paces from the mosque. On a raised platform in the southeastern corner of the compound, Hindu priests placed the idols of Ram and other deities. It was separated from the area around the mosque by stone walls on the east and south, and iron railings on the west. Called Ram Chabutra (Ram’s Platform), it had its own entry through a small gate built into the eastern wall.

In 1860, a group of local Muslims submitted a petition to the district magistrate for the removal of the Ram Chabutra, complaining the ‘Azaan of the Moazzin was met with the blowing of the conch shells by the Hindus’, but it went unheeded.

At midnight on 22 December 1949, a Hindu priest and his followers jumped into the inner courtyard with an idol of Ram as a young boy. Moving quietly in the dark, they planted the idol inside the mosque, in the hall beneath the central dome. Using a trowel, the vandals scraped off Islamic carvings from the inner and outer walls and wrote ‘Rama’ and ‘Sita’ in the hollow spaces.

Its ‘miraculous’ appearance was interpreted as a sign that Ram wished to reclaim his ancestral home. Once again, Ayodhya had new rulers: Indian officers working for the first government of the newly independent India. Many of them openly backed the Hindu stance.

The Muslims in Ayodhya feared these district authorities were supporting the Hindu conspiracy to seize the mosque. By this time, Hindu mobs were regularly beating up Muslims on their way to the daily prayers, and some had even dug up Muslim graves and destroyed their shrines in the vicinity of the mosque. And yet, the authorities repeatedly failed to act. Claiming there would be riots if they removed the idol, they locked up the mosque and put a stop to worship.

That is largely where the dispute stood when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into being on 6 April 1980. The party brought together strands of Hindu nationalist thought that had, in earlier times, been reflected on the right of the dominant Congress Party but had found little purchase in the politics and constitutional practices of independent India. As the social coalition between castes and religions that kept the Congress in power declined, the revivalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a volunteer-driven quasi-militant organization, gained adherents – and the BJP, its political wing, sought to forge a voter base unified by religious identity. That could only happen if India’s billion Hindus set aside their endless differences – languages, castes, sects, deities, rituals – to aspire to one overarching ideal. Ram was the obvious answer. ‘As all rivers flow into the sea, so all good and noble people come to Ram,’ as the celestial sage Narada informs Valmiki at the beginning of the Ramayana.

What had been a provincial issue until this point was on its way to becoming a binding mission for Hindus all over the world. The Hindu nationalist movement hit the ground with a one-point slogan: Mandir wahin banayenge.

(We will build the temple there only.)